Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of groupware, and more particularly to contact management.
Description of the Related Art
Contact management predates the use of personal computers and has formed the foundation of organizational communications. Early attempts at managing external contacts include the simple address book, the Rolodex™, the Filofax™ and straightforward customer lists. Internally, organizational contacts had been managed through traditional internally distributed phone lists and direct-dial tables. More recently, contact management has been automated through the use of electronic address books, sometimes coupled to electronic mail address books. At the extreme, full-blown personal information management applications provide comprehensive contact management facilities and such applications represent the lifeblood of the sales industry.
While contact management applications serve the purpose of storing contacts for easy, fast retrieval, contact management applications cannot in of themselves provide an abstract representation of the relationship between contacts and contact characteristics, including job title, location, expertise, etc. Organizational charts typically form an abstract representation of contacts in a firm as the contacts relate to one another. Drawing programs, and even organizational chart programs, provide an electronic method of creating and managing contacts in an organizational chart. Still, organizational charts alone cannot relate contacts to one another based upon the type of query typical in a contact management application.
In this regard, contact management applications typically provide the end user with the ability to query the application for a person having a particular static characteristic such as last name, address, department, title, and the like. Yet, relational queries such as, “Find the person whose office is closest to my office” are not possible using conventional contact management applications. Worse yet, boolean operations implicating relations between contacts remain similarly impossible. Thus, as an example, the boolean operation “Find the person whose office is closest either to my office or the office of my supervisor” remains an impossibility for conventional contact management systems.